The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [106]
CHAPTER 22
DEADBEAT CLUB
As soon as I landed in Kabul, Farouq and I drove to the Defense Ministry to ask about negotiations with the Taliban. Farouq parked the car. We started walking. I had always regarded this long path, leading past halfheartedly practicing Afghan soldiers, as my own personal march toward sexual harassment. I thought happy thoughts. Farouq talked our way past the first checkpoint. But then we reached the second checkpoint.
“Keep going,” Farouq muttered.
I kept walking, staring straight ahead. But it was no use. The women had spotted me. One lifted up the lacy curtain over the door in the concrete guardhouse. She started yelling. I kept walking. Finally I was stopped by a man with a gun and sent back to the women, inside the dreaded room where the bad things happened. One took my purse and opened up every single zipper, pulling out every lipstick and crumpled bill. Another took me. I held my arms out to the sides and grimaced. She ran her hands under my armpits, grabbed my breasts, squeezed.
“Nice,” she said.
“Just give me one example of an American woman who would blow herself up,” I said to her. “Just one. Doesn’t happen. We could never commit that much to anything.”
In response, she smiled, grabbed my butt, and ran her hands up my inner thighs, all the way to my crotch. She was barely as tall as my rib cage. Then, assault finished, she smiled, pinched my cheek, announced “Very pretty,” and patted me on the back. I walked out, feeling dirty.
For years, whenever people asked how foreign women were treated in Afghanistan, I always said better than in Pakistan. We were rarely felt up in public, and we had an easier time than the male reporters. We could interview women who would never reveal their secrets to a man. And we got bizarre access to the men, even the conservative mullahs, who seemed secretly charmed by the idea of Western women running around. We were the third sex, immune to the local rules for women and entitled to a more exclusive status than Western men. But the checkpoints were bad. We were felt up roughly and searched far more than our male counterparts—by women, no less, who had tried to take my lipstick and held up tampons in a threatening manner, asking what they were for. It was a problem in Pakistan and India as well—it was as if the women hired for these jobs were told that they were being hired because women had different parts than men, so they figured their primary duty was to search only the female parts. At every checkpoint, for every foreign woman, it was the same. Walk inside some dark room with several women drinking tea. Assume the position—arms out to the sides, legs spread. Grit your teeth through the groping. Often a security check consisted of a breast squeeze, a crotch grab, and a slap on the back. Sometimes male guards would come watch the show. Meanwhile Afghan men like Farouq were barely touched.
In Kabul, two places were known as the ninth level of female guard-box hell. The presidential palace, where the women had shoved me up against the wall, once becoming alarmed because I had neglected to wear a bra. And the Defense Ministry, which featured five checkpoints, two with very assertive women.
So on this day, Farouq and I pushed on to the third and fourth checkpoints. Both men, both easy. Then I faced the last and worst checkpoint, inside the ministry headquarters. A shriveled woman with bright-orange-hennaed hair and white roots waved me inside. She grabbed, pulled, yanked, squeezed, searched. I felt like a vegetable. I turned to go, but not fast enough. She pointed at her cheek and puckered her lips. She wasn’t letting me leave until I kissed her. So I kissed her on both cheeks. “Good,” she said. She patted my cheek.
Then, finally, we made it to the office of a Defense Ministry